Archive for the ‘International’ Category

A month ago, I referred to Barack Obama as “quite simply, anti-Israel.” Events in the last month have only confirmed that judgment.

There are many arguments one could marshall to support that assertion, but it strikes me that among the most compelling is this: Mr. Obama has more anger toward Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, than he has toward any other regime in the world–including the most oppressive ones. He has treated the prime minister of the Jewish state with more disrespect and pettiness than any other world leader–including the most brutal ones. The time and energy that President Obama and his administration have spent on attacking Mr. Netanyahu–on the record, on background, and off the record–is astonishing. Only Obama’s golf game seems to command more of his time and passion than does Israel, though with the former it’s all positive energy and with the latter it’s all negative energy.

–SNIP– Mr. Netanyahu is everything Barack Obama is not: Strong, tough, shrewd, unwilling to bend and bow to tyrants and willing to stand up for his nation and defend it abroad. On some level, Mr. Obama must surely know this. He hates Mr. Netanyahu for it, even as others of us admire him all the more for it.

Science displays at Wisconsin State Parks will tell you that glaciers covered our landscape, ending just 12,000 years ago.

We’re talking Ice Age. During the several (yes, more than one) ice ages that Wisconsin has experienced, glaciers reached as far south as southern Illinois.

This means that ice, up to a MILE-THICK, covered this state, and carved out features like the Kettle Moraine. A six-inch snowfall like we get now and then in winter is not what caused these earth changes.

Islamophile: One who is so enchanted by Islam as to be under the influence of its tenets.

In 2009, I noted that Barack Hussein Obama’s remarkably brief White House bio began with this fallacious assertion: “His story is the American story – values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family…” And you can make up the rest.

Something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world’s scientists

Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.

–SNIP– But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.

An Israeli watchdog organization, NGO Monitor, which seeks to track foreign funding of radical non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Israel with a Leftist agenda, has taken aim at the U.S. State Department. They are charging the State Department with funding a campaign with the purpose of defeating current Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in the upcoming March elections.

An American-based organization called OneVoice International, which claims to be an “international grassroots movement that amplifies the voice of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians,” has received two grants from the State Department over the last year. The group is cooperating with Israeli Leftist organization V15 in its anti-Netanyahu campaign.

Plus ça change, say the French, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is certainly true of revolutionary rhetoric: 225 years after the French Revolution, the demands of the Left can still be summed up in the three words of the Jacobin slogan — liberté, égalité, fraternité. Not only do those words sum up the Left, they provide a vivid contrast between the values of a civil society based on biblical morality and the Left’s skewed views.

Liberté:Thomas Jefferson saw “liberty” as one of the fundamental, natural-law rights of man, enshrined alongside “life” and the “pursuit of happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence. The Constitution was later designed to preserve and protect natural rights.

Yet “liberty” does not mean freedom from discipline or restraint. John Adams declared of the American Constitution that it was fit only for a “moral and religious people.”

The story so far: 12 people, including two policemen, have been murdered at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by two hooded men wielding AK47s. In 2011 the magazine was firebombed after running a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. Charlie Hebdo’s most recent tweet, before the latest attack, was a cartoon featuring the leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Conservatives have their Constitution. Progressives have their Narrative. The current battle for America is between these two concepts, and each side uses different rules to fight it.

One set of rules is consistent with an unchanging objective: limited government and individual freedoms. The other side’s rules are as fickle as their goals, which are never fully disclosed beyond the equivocal references to fairness and hyphenated forms of justice. They will have to remain vague and deny their true allegiances until a time when American voters will no longer squirm at the word “socialism.”

And yet spotting them isn’t that hard. As a bird is known by his feathers, socialists are known by their Game.

First tried and mastered in the USSR, the Game has since been popularized around the world, assuming various forms, names, and colors — from red to brown to green. It is now taking hold in the United States under the blue web banners of Obama’s campaign infomercials.

War On Terror: The Taliban outdoes even the Islamic State in its latest atrocity extravaganza. In deploring the attack, the president conveniently omits mention of the group he led the U.S. in surrender to.

British Comedian John Cleese in his farcical show “Fawlty Towers” got howls with his skit about hotel staff being under strict orders not to “mention the war” while German guests were staying. Cleese’s buffoonish hotel owner Basil Fawlty preceded to ask them if they’d like some “Hermann Goering” when he meant “pickled herring.”

Back in 2008, Cleese offered candidate Obama his services as speechwriter — a joke, presumably. But who knows, maybe Cleese is helping craft President Obama’s statements. Because in reacting to a blood-curdling Taliban attack on a Pakistan school on Tuesday that lasted over eight hours and left at least 132 children and 10 staff, including the principal, dead, the president didn’t mention the Taliban.

The eugenics movement is alive and well, still influencing public policy

The title is a literally untranslatable bit of National Socialist jargon which is usually clumsily rendered into English as: “life unworthy of life.”

It was used in the discussion of what are today called “quality of life” issues regarding people born with physical and mental defects, suffering from incurable ailments, and seemingly at the end of their “useful” lives. Another quaint term for such people, likewise untranslatable in its sheer cruelty, was nutzlose Fresser, “useless eaters” (to convey a little more of the original’s flavor: fressen is what animals do, essen is what humans do).

The doctrine embodied in these terms was hardly original with the Nazis (a shorthand expression, too widely used, which conceals the actual nature and origins of the movement called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”). Its origins lay in the eugenics movement, which was a feature of late 19th and early 20th century Western “civilization.” This was one of the more sinister developments of Darwinistic evolutionary theory.